Chapter VII: July, August, and September

In after years Susan was often obliged to bring before her memory very vividly the conditions which could have been overwhelming enough to have driven her into marrying Joe Houghton; for there were times when nothing seemed to explain or justify it.

There had been the mortgage held by Joe, covering the full value of her widowed mother's house and land; his Shylock determination to have his price, which was her hand in marriage; his ruthlessness in having her voted out of her school at the end of May, in order to force her to yield to him; her mother's speechless grief at the bare thought of leaving the home which held all her memories of her dead mate; her sisters' unfitness for earning their own living in any other way than in domestic service on a farm. Whichever way she had turned, there had seemed to be no escape for her. Every possible avenue had seemed closed, with whips and scorpions beating her back. It was not for herself that she had succumbed to the pressure of gaunt Want. She could always, somehow, somewhere, have earned a living for herself, and had she been unable to do so, far easier would it have been to starve and die than to marry a man she despised. But that comparatively simple solution of her difficulty had not been open to her. She must live and take care of her helpless mother and sisters, made helpless through her; for had it not been for her, surely her father would still be with them, to support and comfort them. It had been she who had brought shame and grief and want upon them. She, then, must stand by them and see them through. Would the great sacrifice she was making act as an antidote in her soul to the degradation of such a marriage?

Well, even if she herself must "sink i' the scale," she could not see her mother die before her eyes in pining for her home; her sisters, who had lived and worked for her all her life, forced to the humiliation and slavish labour of domestic service on a farm. She had always believed that circumstances could not crush the valiant soul; that one could rise above and master them if one would. But the conditions which at that time had closed in upon her had seemed to force her to the bitter choice between saving herself and sacrificing her mother and sisters.

She had known from the first that she would not sacrifice them. Her decision had been delayed only by her desperate efforts to save herself as well.

It had been while she was thus battling for her own soul's salvation that Sidney Houghton, never dreaming of his brother's very commercial courtship of the school teacher of White Oak Station, had approached Mrs. Schrekengust with a renewal of the offer he had made to her husband: if she and her three daughters would move to the comfortable little home which he would give them over in Fokendauqua, forty miles distant, he would take upon himself all their debts here in Reifsville and see to it that they should never come to want.

To Susan, the amazing spectacle of her mother's heart-broken submission to this proposition, in the face of her hitherto deep and wordless grief at the mere mention of leaving her home in Reifsville, had had in it something mysteriously sinister. Why had her father denied to her that it was Sidney Houghton who had made this offer to him? He had died with a lie on his lips!--he who had all his life been so painfully truthful. Not for gain, not for any material thing, would he have told a lie. What had been back of his apostasy? What was back of her mother's acquiescence to a thing which was tantamount to signing her own death warrant?

An idea had dawned upon Susan which she had instantly rejected as being altogether incredible. Even Sidney Houghton, weak and false as she knew him to be, would scarcely be capable of the perfidy of threatening her mother (whose holiest religion, like that of all women of her class, was Respectability) with the exposure of the secret shame of her daughter--victimized by himself!--unless Mrs. Schrekengust would at once move away with her family from the precarious vicinity of his home.

And yet, impossible as such baseness seemed, even for Sidney Houghton, what lesser necessity than the maintaining of their ghastly secret could so have coerced her mother?

A hot fury of rebellion had risen in Susan's heart against the humiliation of being thus driven away for the sake of Sidney's security and peace of mind. If nothing were now left but to choose between marrying Joe or having her mother suffer and surely die from being beholden to Sidney Houghton for a home and a livelihood in a distant town, could she hesitate? She had the human weakness to feel that there would be actually a drop of bitter consolation for her in thus defying her betrayer and going boldly to live in the very shadow of his home; to be hourly in his sight; to pass daily to and fro before the very eyes of his wife!

Her decision had been swiftly made.

On the day when Sidney had called by appointment to give over to her mother the deed to the Fokendauqua house and lot and receive in exchange the mortgaged Reifsville property, he had been met with the announcement that Mrs. Schrekengust could not now fulfil her part of the bargain to which she had previously agreed, inasmuch as her daughter, Susan, could not, under the present circumstances, be enticed away to Fokendauqua--seeing she no longer made her home with her mother--having married Joseph Houghton that very morning, July 28th, and gone to live at the tenant-farmer's cottage at White Oak Farm; and that therefore there was now no reason why they should leave Reifsville; for Joseph Houghton had that morning, before the marriage ceremony, given them a clear deed to their house and land.

How Sidney had received this astounding information Susan could only guess from the incoherent account of it she had received later from her mother and sisters.

"Och, Susie, he took it hard!"

"He turned awful white and there for a while he couldn't har'ly speak!"

"I believe, Susie, he likes you _yet_!"

"He ast me," said Mrs. Schrekengust, "what fur did I leave you marry a fellah like Joe that ain't worthy to tie your shoes yet! And I answered him, 'Yes, what fur did I ever leave you, Sidney Houghton, keep comp'ny with her!--you that wasn't fit neither to _lick_ her shoes yet!' He turned whiter'n ever when I sayed that. But he ast us what we thought could have _made_ you marry Joe, seein' as it wasn't in nature for a girl like you to love sich a fellah. And I sayed that now you had to be glad fur any decent husband; and that if Joe knowed all, he wouldn't think you was good enough fur _him_."

"But Sidney he wouldn't have it no other way," put in Lizzie, "than that you'd throwed yourself away."

"But I tol' him," added Mrs. Schrekengust, "you had a'ready throwed yourself away as fur as you could on _him_."

"Yes, Mom she come back at him fierce!" said Lizzie.

"And he took it that meek and calm, Susie, that it wondered me!" put in Addie.

Susan had no conscientious qualms in marrying Joe without "confessing her past," inasmuch as she asked no questions as to his past.

"He, too, was married before," she reasoned; for she persisted in believing that before high heaven, or "whatever gods there be," she had been Sidney Houghton's wife.

She felt sure that if Joe had been a man whom she could have found it possible to love, she would have felt impelled to tell him of her unmarried motherhood. But he had bought her for a price, as shamelessly as he would have bought a cow or a horse! Therefore, her past, like his, was her own.

In the early months of her married life, she was, however, never without a guilty sense of wronging her husband in her heart by her secret loathing of him; and she tried conscientiously to atone by scrupulously performing what seemed to her her wifely obligations; and by the devoted care she gave to his child; submitting to many things which otherwise she would not have borne--his little contemptible, maddening meannesses about expenditures, his refusal to hire any housework, his exactions of services from her such as he would not have dared to ask of any hired servant or housekeeper.

When it was too late--when both his exactions and her submission had become a habit with them not easy to break--she realized that she had begun all wrong.

"For if from the first I had taken a stand against such a régime, I could have carried the day!"

"By the time you learn, through bitter mistakes, how to live," she often reflected in after years, "your knowledge is of no use to you except to make you wild with regret!"

She had made Joe promise (and she could absolutely depend on his word) that he would never reveal to Josie in the years to come that she was not his own mother.

"I'll get that out of it, anyway--a son's love for his mother," she had told herself.

For Susan had learned from her doctor, over a year ago, that she could never bear another child. Had she not known this, no other considerations would have been strong enough to have forced her to marry Joe. An instinctive conviction that it would be a crime to let a child be born of a loveless marriage would have held her back. Susan's intuitive ethics, it will be observed, were not those commonly held by respectable people.

The "bitter consolation" she had anticipated in defying Sidney Houghton's efforts to get her away from tie neighbourhood of his home, and coming to live at his very door, was postponed by his departure from home immediately after her marriage. He left, with his wife, child, and nurse, for a month at Newport.

"I see through that move!" Joe declared to Susan one day over their mid-day dinner in the cottage kitchen, Josie in a high chair at Susan's side. "They're too stuck-up, him and her, to take notice to _my_ wife! So, to save their faces, they go off! Sich extravagance! Payin' _ho_tel board when they're got a big, cool place like theirn to stay at!"

"Your sister-in-law seems to care so little for her baby, I'm surprised she takes him with her when she goes away. He would be quite as well off here alone with his nurse as he is with her."

"Right you are! _She_ don't give him no attention; nothin' like what you give to Josie, and him your step-child yet."

"We're to forget that he is not my own child," Susan reminded him.

"But Sid _he's_ anyhow crazy about his kid," continued Joe. "He would not let him here alone with that dopplig nurse girl! You see, Susan, Sid ain't takin' no chances on that there baby dyin' and my Josie inheritin' White Oak Farm!"

Susan recognized it as very characteristic of Sidney to have run away for a month from a situation which he must ultimately face.

From New York came a gorgeous wedding present from Sidney and his wife; a most unsuitable gift for a tenant-farmer's menage: a huge satin-lined case filled with every possible form of table silver--knives, forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, dessert spoons, bouillon spoons, orange spoons, after-dinner coffee spoons, oyster forks, fruit knives, bread-and-butter knives.

Joe gloated over the moneyed value of it, even while denouncing his brother's reckless and senseless extravagance.

"Put it good away; it would get stole if it was knew we had such grand stuff around. You see, Susan, you never was used to such things and don't know their walue; but I was, when I was a kid livin' at home, before my father died."

Susan did not think it worth while to tell him how "used to such things" she had become during her years at school, through the friendships she had made with girls from homes so unlike her own as to have seemed to her a wonderland of luxury and ease and refinement.

But she was glad that Joe would not expect her to use this silver. It was promptly locked away in the attic.

From the moment that Susan had made up her mind to marry Joe her heart had desperately fixed itself upon the one compensation, besides her family's safety, which she might hope to find in her situation--the care and love of the baby. But since affection is not a thing to be commanded at will, perhaps the very intensity of her determination to lay hold, here, upon comfort and even blessedness, defeated her desire. Josie, although healthy, pretty, of average intelligence, and at times both cunning and interesting, proved to be peevish, exacting, and selfish to a degree that seemed to Susan quite hopeless. She could not, no matter how hard she tried, warm up to him. She was sure that if he had responded in the least to her overtures he would have won her immediately and completely, no matter what his trying faults of disposition. But nothing she could do seemed to awaken in the child any affection for her. She would have concluded that he had no heart, but for the fact that he was so extremely attached to his father.

Joe, who was morbidly jealous of Josie's affection, instead of being troubled by his persistence in repelling his step-mother's advances, seemed to gloat over it. While he would have resented her least neglect of the boy, he seemed to begrudge her the natural reward of her faithful care.

"Come here to your pop, Josie--see what I got fur you!" he would entice the child away from her the moment his jealous watchfulness detected in Josie any sign of fondness for her.

Josie very quickly learned to associate a rough repulsion of his "mother" with the reward of a lozenge or a ride "upsy-daisy" on his father's foot.

Susan foresaw that when it came to questions of discipline Joe would always side with the child against her. She feared that it would require more patience and diplomacy than she could ever hope to command to deal with the problem.

Joe's jealousy was not confined to his child. It early became manifest that he would brook no rival in Susan's regard; such, for instance, as her love of books, the one love left to her out of the wreck of her life. He wished and expected her to be interested in nothing else in the world but his comfort and welfare and that of his boy. She soon found herself instinctively putting her reading out of sight at his approach and busying herself with house- or needle-work, in order to spare herself the morose, sullen silence, lasting sometimes a whole day, with which he would signify his displeasure when he found her reading; or his tirades against the sort of books she "wasted her time on." All novels were lumped together as abominations. Poetry was "for Sunday afternoons if you got to read it, but certainly not for busy week-days." Science baffled him. He once found her reading (or trying to read) Darwin's "Origin of Species," and when he had demanded to be told what it was about and had heard her reply, he waxed truly indignant. "The stuff yous simple females'll swallow yet!"

She tried to tell him that the evolution of man from a lower species was no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact, and she read him some of the evidences of that fact.

But he wasn't impressed. "I can't pitcher it to myself. Can you pitcher it to yourself, a man's ever havin' been in such a form? It's a lie! Don't fill your head with such foolishness!"

"But it is the truth."

"No," he firmly denied it, "I can't pitcher to myself a man's ever having no other form. Why, no person in White Oak Station believes such a thing as that there!"

"Must I believe nothing except what the people of White Oak Station believe?" smiled Susan.

"You're safer to."

"Why?"

"What's the use of thinkin' different from other folks?"

"What's the use of thinking just _like_ other people?"

"Och, well," he gave it up, exhausted with such unwonted mental strenuousness, "have your own way. Think it, then--but _keep it to yourself_. I don't want folks 'round here sayin' I married a crazy woman!"

When just a month after Susan's marriage her mother died very suddenly at the end of August, from heart failure, Susan's wild rebellion against Fate, that she should have sacrificed herself so needlessly, turned itself speedily into a great indignation against herself; against that fatal weakness in her character which seemed always to inhibit her from wrestling with the knotty places in her life and conquering them.

"I've let myself be shoved about like a puppet!"

If one could only have the courage always to do what, in spite of threatened disaster, one saw was the only true thing to do--and then trust to Life to right it!

But of course only great souls were large enough and strong enough for such high heroism.

Joe was not unsympathetic for her grief for her mother. But he had a grotesque way of commingling his gentler feelings with his dominating sordidness.

"I guess, now, Susan, you'll be wantin' me to buy you one of these here stylish crape wails; ain't?--you bein' so much for dressin' stylish that way. But I took notice you didn't wear one of 'em fur your pop when he died; I guess because you couldn't afford one; for I heard a'ready that they cost awful expensive--them crape wails. And I hold that since you didn't wear one fur your pop, it wouldn't look according, your wearing one fur your mom."

"Mennonites don't wear mourning."

"Yes, well, but you ain't no Mennonite."

"None of us will wear mourning," she reassured him.

His relief made him beam upon her benignly. "You show your good sense, Susan. Fur it would be a awful waste to let all them good clo'es you're got a'ready and go buy new black ones; ain't, it would?"

Susan vaguely wondered what it was going to be like when the clothes she now had were worn out and she was obliged to buy new ones. Her work as housekeeper and child's nurse was harder, more distasteful, and involved longer hours than had ever been the case with school teaching; yet she had nothing for it that she could call her own; nothing except what Joe saw fit to give her. Thus far he had never voluntarily offered her a dollar; and when she had one day asked him for money, he had inquired what she wanted it for. It had been for some household expenses, not for herself. He had given it to her grudgingly, mistrustfully, as though he suspected her of a design to defraud him.

Such was the chaos and horror of her soul in confronting, now, the needless sacrifice she had made in marrying Joe that the harrowing funeral orgie and all its gruesome accompaniments drove her almost into unrestrained hysteria. First, there was the elderly woman, unknown to the family with a passion for funerals, who had walked in from the country, five miles, "to view the remains of the deceased."

"I didn't know her in life, but I'd like to see her in death," she devoutly explained--which so moved the hearts of Lizzie and Addie that they made her stay "for dinner."

Then the preacher's hypocritical tones and meaningless stock phrases which made Susan grind her teeth in impotent rebellion--"portals of memory," "life's peaceful waters," "God's smiles," "the Other Shore," the awful hymn droned out a line at a time alternately by the preacher and the people:

We'll miss you from our home, dear mother,
We'll miss you from your place;
A shadow over our lives is cast;
We'll miss the sunshine of your face.

Our hearts are bound with sorrow,
Yet the thought comes with each sigh,
She is safe with God's dear angels;
We shall meet her by and by.

And finally Lizzie's controversary with the undertaker over the palms which stood grouped at the head of the coffin and which the undertaker was going to load on his truck and take away with him.

"No, you don't!" Lizzie indignantly stopped him, right in the presence of their assembled kindred, friends, and neighbours, "you ain't to claim back _all_ them palms! One third of them palms is _mine_--and them goes with Mom along!"

They had almost had a tug of war about it over the coffin.

Susan's struggles to keep herself in hand through the nightmare of it all ended in a nervous collapse which left her prostrated for weeks with a continuous, unconquerable pain in her head just at the base of her brain.

Joe's genuine alarm, his unexpected sympathy for her suffering, were a surprising revelation to her. She had not thought him capable of real tenderness except for his boy. The extent of his feeling for her was indicated by his surprisingly suggesting one day, with evident intent to find something that would catch her interest, that perhaps she might like to learn to drive his roadster? She had several times requested to be allowed to do so and he had always refused.

"If you learn oncet you'll be wantin' to _go_ all the time and you'd let your housework too much. Gasoline costs too expensive to be used unnecessary," he had said.

But now he told her that perhaps it would after all be an economical move and save a lot of his valuable time to let _her_ make the occasional necessary trips to town.

He stipulated, however, that she must exercise self-restraint in the use of such a precious commodity as gasoline.

Susan's relation with Sidney, though it had not been sanctified by society or religion, had yet had in it such elements of beauty, joy, sacredness, that it had seemed at times to justify itself--as her entirely respectable marriage could not do, now that its motive, her mother's welfare, was removed. It was now that she felt herself to be "living in sin," as she had never felt while she loved; and when her mother's death removed the necessity of her immolation, she passionately longed to escape from her ignominy.

She even went to the length of suggesting to her sisters, some weeks after her mother's funeral, that if they had courage enough to give back to Joe their home in Reifsville, go with her to the city and open a boarding-house, she would leave her husband (whom she had married only to save her mother the grief of losing her home), and would help them to earn a comfortable living. Of course if they would not consent to give back their property to Joe, she could not leave him; it would be going back on her bargain; it would be like stealing; but if they would consent----

But the consternation, even horror, of their faces at this, to them, disreputable proposition, told her, before they answered her, that she could never persuade them to such a step.

"Och, Susie, are you a loose woman that you talk so light about leaving your Mister! Who ever heard the likes!" exclaimed Lizzie.

The three sisters were sitting together on the front porch of the Reifsville cottage, Susan having driven over from White Oak in the roadster after the early farm supper, to put before them her plan.

"It's because I'm not a loose woman that I think I ought to leave Joe," she tried to explain. "I know how queer it sounds to you and Addie for me to say I think it's my living with him that's immoral--but that's what I think."

"But he's your _Mister_, Susie! How you talk, anyhow!"

"No, he is not my husband!" she suddenly cried out, passionately. "He's my keeper, my owner, and I'm his chattel! I can't stand it! I can't bear it!"

Her sisters stared in amazement upon her shrinking, shivering body, her trembling lips, her white face.

"Don't he use you nice, Susie?" asked Addie, anxiously.

"For Mother's sake I could have borne it, and if she bad lived longer I might have gotten used to it. But now it seems so senseless to go on enduring such a life! I'm young--I'm not twenty-one yet. To think of living all the rest of my life with him! Oh, Lizzie, I can't! I just can't!"

"But what's the matter of him? He seems awful nice and common toward what his stuck-up brother is!" argued Lizzie. "And he makes you a good purwider, don't he, Susie?"

"It's what he is, not what he does!" cried Susan, despairingly.

"You knowed what he was when you said Yes to him. And even fur Mom's sake you hadn't ought to have said Yes unlest you knowed you could stand him pretty good."

"I know that now. I know I made a terrible mistake. I was an idiot! There's no excuse for me! But before it's too late, Lizzie," Susan pleaded, "I want to mend my mistake!"

"It is too late," Lizzie pronounced. "Would it be treatin' Joe right and fair to up and leave him and disgrace him so before all the folks, when you ain't got no good reason except that he mebby kreistles* you a little?"

* Disgusts.

Susan had not thought of that--of how unfair it would be to Joe.

"But he wouldn't deserve any sympathy," she argued, piteously, "for he backed me into a corner and forced me to marry him--on pain of our losing our home--when he knew I did not care for him and did not want to marry him."

"But you did marry him," said Addie, conclusively. "And what's done's done."

"Yes," corroborated Lizzie, "as it is, so it is, and that ends it."

"Why should it end it? It shan't end it!" cried Susan, fighting for her very soul. "You must help me to get out of it! You have helped me all my life--and I never needed your help more than I need it now!"

"We never helped you to go wrong, Susie--to disgrace and shame us!" Lizzie maintained. "And this here thing you're astin us to do--to help you leave your Mister--just like a woman that's got loose morals that way--it wouldn't be right!"

"It seems to me you're got it good," said Addie, "with that there pretty little boy and this here automobile car of Mister's and him so well-fixed and all, so's you ain't got to worry!"

"You offer me a stone for bread," responded Susan, hopelessly, as she rose to leave them. "You would think it right for me to go away from him if he beat or starved me. You can't see that one's heart and mind and soul may be starved and torn every hour, every minute! You can't see!"

But even as she spoke, Susan realized, with a vague pain in her heart for her sisters, that perhaps the greater tragedy was theirs--in that they could not see.